The bench model took the rest of day four to build, and it looked like nothing anyone would have called a lamp.
At its center, on the bench plate, sat a block of the yard’s steel, roughly the size of a loaf, that stood for Hearth’s heart. Around it, in a ring, six of the load bank’s heating coils, unbolted from their rack and mounted on ceramic posts, that stood for the heart’s load: the stoves and crop domes and pumps of the Low Brace. When Eshel switched power into the coils, they glowed orange, and drew, and the draw was the load. Beside the block, in a steel frame bolted to the bench, the governor: a set of bearings on a spindle with a balance weight, which Tavin had machined that afternoon from the pieces he had laid out. The governor’s job was to hold the reference: to keep a steady beat that the brace could follow, so that when the load on the heart rose, the brace would rise with it in time.
And beside the governor, a tin bowl of water, for cooling the probe that read the block’s tone. Tavin had filled it from the quench tank.
